Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Impeach Alberto Gonzales

"Impeaching Alberto Gonzales is a no-brainer for Democrats purely on the merits: Gonzales is at the center of Bush's crimes, including authorizing torture and illegal wiretapping (which wasn't restricted at all by Gonzales' announcement that a FISA judge mysteriously approved the illegal program.)

"It is glaringly apparent that the twisted and bloodthirsty tenets of neoconservatism which are dominating our country -- this insatiable craving for slaughter that is as endless as it is pointless, and an equally insatiable desire to expand the government power of their Leaders -- are not rooted in some rotted, coherent geopolitical doctrine as much as they are rooted in rotted personality disorders. All of that is sociopathic and authoritarian and those are phenomena far more psychological than political.

For that reason, the Bush Movement at its core -- the true, hard-core, reality-denying, warmongering, dead-ender True Believers -- is much more of a psychological movement than it is a political movement, and to ignore the former makes it impossible to understand or meaningfully discuss the latter. There is no reason to ignore the impulses and personality types of the people who for the last six years have governed, and continued to govern, our country, nor is there any reason to pretend that this all stems from sterile and elevated good faith political disputes when it doesn't."

* wapo has an interesting article on A1 about Bush's "surge" and how Bush (and nomentum, kristol and kagan) are the only people who thought it was a good idea. The headline?

"Embattled, Bush Held To Plan to Salvage IraqIn Face of Advice, He Pushed Buildup"

the last line is hysterical:

""The president came out and said, 'Let's err on the side of making sure they have everything they need,' " said a senior official."

Persons on Republican mailing lists this week received an appeal for funds from Dick Morris, President Bill Clinton's political strategist in 1995-1996, asking for a contribution between $25 and $100 or more to finance a critical film documentary of Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Signing the letter as "Former Clinton Adviser," Morris wrote: "If you liked how the Swift Boat Veterans turned the tide against John Kerry, you understand how a top Clinton aide can turn the tables and stop a Clinton-style liberal from becoming the next president of the United States."

"Over the last few years, the IAEA has uncovered a great deal of information about the Iranian nuclear program, a fact acknowledged by left and right alike. As a result, the intelligence community doubled its estimate of the time it would take Iran to get a nuclear weapon -- from five years to ten. Should we take this as gospel? Of course not. But it's significant that the more we've learned about the Iranian nuclear program, the less capable the Iranians appear to actually produce a nuclear weapon. "

* Raw:

(Rep) Hinchey told RAW STORY he plans to reintroduce the Media Ownership Reform Act (MORA) that would break up media monopolies and restore the Fairness Doctrine, which was eliminated by the Federal Communications Commission under the Reagan administration.[]Hinchey faults the mainstream media for failing to tell Americans the truth about “an administration in Washington that has falsified information to people about weapons of mass destruction in order to justify an illegal and unjustified attack perpetrated on Iraq. How was it that Congress voted to give the President that authority? And how was it that so many people just bought into it when Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center and whatever weapons they had were given to them by the Reagan administration?[]Asked whether the Congressman believes there is now an attempt at a fascist takeover of the U.S., a Hinchey staffer noted that Rep. Hinchey’s legislation arose from his concern about increasing concentration of media ownership into the hands of a few individuals and corporations. “Whether or not there is a purpose that includes fascism, we could wind up in a fascist situation if corporations end up controlling information without the government providing some balancing mechanism, such as the Fairness Doctrine,” said the staffer”

"In short, Iran can make a choice: perhaps, if the U.S. wants to go down this road, it makes more sense from an Iranian perspective to keep the U.S. in Iraq and bleeding there than it does to push the U.S. out. Iran can remain publicly committed to the end of the occupation, but if the U.S. opts to treat Iran like an enemy, it can easily resort to the most successful tactics of U.S. enemies -- asymmetric warfare, designed to exasperate and exhaust U.S. forces. No matter what, the U.S. couldn't invade Iran, goes the thinking, as long as its troops hold Iraq, so it makes sense to confront a bellicose America while it's tied down in Iraq, where Iranian assets are large and deep and U.S. familiarity and competence is comparatively minute.

"At any rate, what I think happened is that when the Bush/Scowcroft/Baker faction decided to use Little George as their presidential poster boy to expand their Middle-East-based wealth and power, they didn't reckon with Cheney and Rumsfeld. They thought their boy would be personable and easy to control. The key moment was when Cheney went looking for a vice-presidential candidate and found himself. Once they had given him the opening and he had publicly used it to aggrandize himself and his agenda, B/S/B realized that for the sake of party solidarity, they had to live with it. When Baker engineered the coup that was Florida (and I do think one of the "perks" Bush offered as a candidate was that Florida was guaranteed ahead of time by Jeb and K. Harris), I think that B/S/B and C/R found themselves in an uneasy alliance--goals were the same, but temperaments were different. Right there at the pivot was Little George."